Money Money Money

A couple of days ago, I woke up in the post operative room of a hospital in Mumbai and the first thing I heard in my drug dulled ears was the mewing cries of a child saying “ghar jana hai, ghar jana hai”.

The cries went on and on, soft, scared and persistent till I managed to open my eyes and saw opposite me on a bed a mother holding a small child cradled in her arms, who was burrowing her way into her mothers chest crying softly with the repeated plea to go home.

I managed to drag out the words to ask her what happened and why was she crying, and even in the state I was in, I wept when I heard the story.

Her mother explained that the little girl was 4 years old and her name was Heer. It seems that their building is being redeveloped, like a large majority of buildings in Mumbai. During this redevelopment, the residents are still there for some overlapping period and  the builder has put up a temporary water lines to start his preliminary work. This means that the place where the children normally run around had water pipes across it.

The kid being a kid, went out to play in the evening and was trying to swing from this tempting water pipe line when it broke and crushed off two of her fingers. The end tragic result, an innocent child of 4 years or so has to spend the rest of her life with 2 fingers less. My mind took a few minutes to digest the fact.

Once it did, my rage was unbearable. The rage at us ourselves and our stupidity, our greed. I have been to a few society meetings recently talking about re-development and all I hear is what can we squeeze out of the builder, how much more can we get, thats all , more more more.

Even if there is some talk of safety, its not about the safety of the residents, its how do we safely secure our flats, and never never about how do we secure our children and their future.

No society today talks about how safe will the layout be for our children, they talk about how much more carpet area we can squeeze officially and un officially. No society talks about if we will have a green space for the children to play in, its always about how many cars can we park if we convert the proposed green space to a parking lot.

In the last 6 months , at my residence both my cars as well as the cars of all my neighbours are covered with paint spots as a souvenir of the society being beautified, one of my cars got covered in cement the other day thanks to the building next to my office being “redeveloped”. Best part is that out of the 40 odd cars in my compound, I’m the only one who complained, the rest have accepted it as “hota hai”.

Friends, our greed is killing our children's future. When we were children , it was a sheer joy to run around in the compound playing Dabba I spy and chor police. We turn around and pontificate to our children for spending too much time indoors but have we done anything to make them enjoy the outdoors, we are turning what little they have into hells playground.

I wrote last week about Mumbai 227 and how we need to get the right corporators in place in Feb elections who understand that parks are meant for children to play  and not for slums to encroach. But before we embark on cleaning up the city, WE NEED to introspect and get our head straight. Let us clean our own houses first before we start preaching to others.

If we don’t want or demand the basic needs for our children why would the politicians care. They are servants and will only serve what the master orders.

WAKE UP !!! GET ACTIVE !!! Find a green space in your area, collect your locals, clean it up,  give your child a space. Tomorrow it could be your child not Heer who has to live his / her life with 2 fingers less.

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It can be done

Pictures of garden we created from a broken down plot using monetary and time contributions from local citizens and MLA & MP in Versova. Proof that the ordinary citizen and good politicians can make a difference

 

Anatomy of a Mahatma

As my readers may have noticed, I have been unusually quiet the last few weeks. Fact is, I have been introspecting. A lot of my readers have written in and said that I’m doing a yeoman job waking up people and India needs more and more people to light such fires.

Unfortunately, this is a huge responsibility for anyone to carry and it scares the life out of me. With 50,000 plus readers, what if I write something which is not correct ? Even if I’m sure of what I write and do through research before writing, we are all humans swayed by emotions, what if I guide people wrong ?

If a person like me just someone off the street is bowed under such a burden, I got to thinking what an impossible burden it must be like to be a Mahatma and meet peoples expectations. What must it be like to have people like Tushar Gandhi pass summary judgement on you and call you un Gandhian when he himself sells the Gandhi name for a few dollars.

What must it be like to wake up every day with hundreds of reporters waiting to shove a mike in your mouth for a sound byte. What must it be like to say what you feel and have every two bit wannabe dissect and rip it to bits and my eyes filled up with tears.

I started looking deeply at the closest we have today to a Mahan atma (great soul), Anna Hazare. Everywhere I look, people argue back and forth saying that he is modern Gandhi, others argue that it is wrong to call him that, but no one is really looking at why he raises such strong feelings in all of us.

I started looking at some of the qualities which according to me make people call others Mahan Atmas.

Playfulness: One thing common between Gandhi and Hazare is the playful way they treat some topics. Playfulness and child like innocence in certain matter is according to me one of the key elements in becoming a Mahatma. Unless someone is one with his / her inner child, everything in the world seems grave, somber and dark

Persistence: Another thing which I see as the signs of becoming a Mahan Atma is the conviction of knowing the right path and then sticking to it come what may.

Simplicity: Mahan atmas live life with very few trappings, as Anna says ,the total sum of his possessions is he has a bedding and a plate.

Good of others before onesself: A Mahan Atma always thinks and talks in the terms of greater good, never in selfish terms. Every word he utters and every act he undertakes reeks of what will benefit others and general society and never himself / herself.

Readiness to give up his life: A Mahan Atma knows that life is illusionary and that death is but a counterpart. This readiness to give up his life for his principles is another of the trademarks of a Mahan Atma.

Non violence: A Mahan Atma has realised that violence is the last tool of fear and stems out of it. A real Mahan Atma practices non violence in all walks of life and not just in words.

Some of the people I would qualify as Mahatmas  based on the above are Mahatma Gandhi, Osho, Sharmila Irom, Sai baba of Pasupatty and of course now Anna Hazare. (This list is just off the top of my head and is not all inclusive)

Now me being the devilish person I am, of course couldn’t help making a comparison chart against our current day politicians:

 

Trait	Mahan Atma	Politican
	Gandhiji, Osho, Sai Baba, Hazare	Sharad Pawar, PM, Sonia Gandhi, PC, Sibal, RG
Playfullness	Many examples of jests on record from each	The closest we ever get is perhaps a something said in moronism instead of jest which turns funny eg RG’s remark “ how long will you beg….”
Persistence	From Hazares fasts to Osho’s sticking to his ideas even to the point of death	Manmohan Singh says one thing one day and reiterates the next. Munde says he will throw Enron into Arabian Sea and then calls them saviours
Simplicity	A plate and a bed , living in a temple	Palaces of gold like the Reddys or being caught at an American Airport with a roll of Dollars and a Columbian drugloards daughter as a companion
Good of others before onesself	From Hazares fast to death and almost dying to Gandhiji’s fast for Harijans	I don’t even need to say anything here, its self apparent
Readiness to give up his life	Each one of the above has been ready to lay down their life for a cause they believe in	Our politicians are so afraid for their lives that they run around with gun toting guards
Non violence	Each of the Mahatmas has professed that he would rather die than have even one iota of physical violence committed against another human being.	Politicians use violence at the slightest drop to cover their fears, from Jallianwallah Baugh, to midnight raid on Baba Ramdev’s shibir.

Friends, lets face facts, Mahatmas are a rarity and when we do find one , lets not wait till after he is dead to put garlands on his pictures or use him as an ideal image to push guilt onto our children, lets go up to him NOW when he is alive and throw our arms around him.

Let them know that we acknowledge that we cannot even be one 100th of the person they are. Let them know we understand that the burden he / she carries is enormous and we appreciate whatever he/ she is doing since they are doing it for us.

Satyamev Jayathe, Vande Maatram

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AARAKSHAN

I am in splits. Sometimes politicians are so funny without even knowing that they are being so. I just heard that politicians are insisting on reservations in Lokpal.

Now let us understand their twisted logic. Reservations are meant as a handicap where there is lack of something and the playing field needs to be levelled for the greater good eg backward classes have a problem getting into good schools so we have reservation to allow them to move forward.

For example in Education, this means that a person with much lower grades than a normal person can get into a prime school if he is from a backward class, this is by presuming that he had a problem getting a good education and giving him a handicap. ( see my earlier article on reservations and why Indians like being a backward class)

Lokpal is an anti corruption law, does having a reservation means that some people who are weak in corruption should be given a handicap so that they can catch up to others ?

By this twisted logic of the politicians, reservations in Lokpal should mean that we should allow someone with a corruption taint on their name onto the panel just because they belong to a certain category of society to sit on the panel with completely clean people to create a level playing field since they may have had a disadvantage which made them turn slightly dishonest ?

Jai Ho !!

Merry go round

When I was young , whenever we visited the local mela (local fair), one of the things I wanted to ride the maximum was a merry go round. Now that I’m grown up, I no longer see the fascination in it, however it looks like no matter how old our politicians grow they never seem to want to get off the political merry go round.

We have Advani at 84 years young still harbouring ambitions of being the next PM of India.

Another example is that we have politicians who fail year after year in even the basic issues like controlling onion prices and allow it to yo yo at Rs. 120 at least once a year for some reason of the other are still kept in the chair as Agricultural Minister and if you point a finger at them, ulta chor kotwal ko dante ( the thief reprimands the police)

The other day this situation was thrust in my face when I couldn’t help but notice a very funny contradiction in the local Times of India. On Page one, was an article saying that Sharad Pawar made fun of Anna for saying that he is supporting corrupt politicians and therefore deserved the slap and maybe many more.

On page 5, there was a second article, about how the NCP is taking back its suspension of a rape accused MLA since it needs his support to win the upcoming elections. (pic enclosed of both articles)

Please keep in mind that NCP is a political party led by Sharad Pawar.  

Has anyone wondered how is it our politicians get away with such blatantly false statements. Simple, its our own idiotic “chalta hai” attitude. We are to blame.

Let me share another example is, we have a Govt which flip flop every few hours of each and every point in the Lok Pal Bill. The PM says something, and few hours later, there is a Cong meeting and he does a volte face. What do we do, shrug our shoulders and say “mind it, we are like this only”

Honestly friends its now so bad that I doubt that even one thinking person in India can stand up and honestly swear that he truly believes in his heart that the UPA will bring in a strong anti corruption bill.

Its again and again thrust in our face that politics is a funny funny game and we can do nothing about it.

The other day , I happened to pass by the Andheri office of our local MP and saw a swirling mass of humanity. I naturally asked what the issue was and was informed that Andheri was a ladies reserved constituency in the upcoming municipal elections. This means we need a female candidate come municipal elections in Feb  and that this was a drive to register the local female constituents as to who would like to be a councillor.

I looked around and was shocked with the quality of women candidates present. We must remember that Versova has a large fisherwomen contingent. A unusual number of them seemed to be present all dolled up as if they were on their way to a wedding and the raw hunger I saw on their faces was amazing. It was as if the elections are a lottery and that this was their way of buying a ticket to riches. I can bet my hat that maybe one out of the couple of hundred women there would be able to understand the importance of having BRIMSTOWAD as a urgent drainage solution. ( see my earlier article on the current quality of councillors who control the life and death decisions of Mumbai)

If even one of them actually gets the Congress ticket, I can understand the reason why Mumbai has lost almost all of its green space, since they looked like the kind who would be more comfortable if the local green space was encroached upon instead of cleared as soon as possible.

In this context, I must say the MNS has shown one step in the right direction by having a preliminary exam for its potential and sitting candidates, but as we can see from the article above political exigencies may force all good intensions out of the window.

Friends, One valiant effort being made and one which I fully support is called the Mumbai 227.

One group of active Mumbai citizens have finally had enough. Mumbai has 227 wards and they have decided that they would make a candidate stand in each and every ward in the next Municipal elections under a single banner called Mumbai 227. If even 10% of them happen to win (just 20 odd seats) , a significant amount of transparency would come into the system since these councillors would then act as a check and balance.

Of course the natural questions came into my mind when I was introduced to the concept and I spoke to them about it. The first was, what would change ? I was informed that there are 5 weaknesses they have identified with the earlier citizens candidates as of date and have tried to plug each and every one.

1) Most of the work done in the BMC is in Marathi so the candidate has to be fluent in it

2) Just 1 or 2 candidates winning seats would not help since He / she would be deboned in no time 1 civil society swimmer against 226 potential flesh eating political piranhas , so it has to be at least 10% to make a dent.

3) There has to be a open continuous review mechanism in place post elections by the people in the respective wards with no political bosses to answer to.

4) Most current candidates put forward by political parties need to work half for themselves and their public and half for their parties to ensure that enough grease is available to keep the wheels running.

5) The selections of the candidates must be done in a clean efficient transparent manner. (Mumbai 227 has enlisted the voluntary services of a HR company to shortlist the candidates and pre screen them to ensure suitability)

Its a mammoth task  Mumbai 227 has taken on and my hats off to them. 

To all of my readers who write in regularly expressing their helplessness at the carnage around them and asking what they can do to change the situation, I say:

Now is the time, grab the moment, “CARPE DIEM”

Log onto mumbai227.com, register yourself, give them time, give them help in whatever way you can. Every little bit counts.

Friends, if you don’t do it now, along with the fancy cars and multi crore flats, you leave your children, you will also leave them a festering stinking city where slum dwellers camp right outside their compound walls and they can do nothing about it.

A life too far

Today a bike rider whizzed by me ridding triple seat. You could see the bike was tottering under their combined weight and it was an accident waiting to happen.

Ever since the triple seat stunt of Amir Khan in the Bollywood movie, Three Idiots, we see more and more people riding triple seat on motorbikes in Mumbai and all across India. Its so bad that not only do these triple seats whiz by cops standing nonchalantly, now even the cops do it and no one blinks an eye.

A little later in the day, one of my reader told me a story and it hit home. I then realized that along with our collective conscience our civic conscience has also started relaxing slowly slowly.

She said that a young friend of hers was killed in a traffic accident a couple of days ago. My automatic question was , “ on a bike ?”

Isn’t it funny how the moment we hear the words young person and motor accident , our mind automatically assumes it was on a bike and the youngster was driving rashly. Why do we automatically assume its always the youngster to blame ? Its not that we have all not been young and brash (read my article those were the days for details) 

I asked for details of the accident and was shocked when I heard it. It seems that these four youngsters, only 18 years old, were in a Manipal college to study. They got into an auto, three in the back and one in the front next to the driver ( as is the norm in the smaller cities)

They were going up a lane in semi darkness, when all of a sudden a truck turned into the lane at a sharp corner perhaps at a speed that he hit the auto head on. There was no time for anyone to react. WHAM ! one split second and it was over.

The two in the front were able to bale due to the very design of the auto which has wide openings in the front but the three in the back were caught dead on. One died on the spot, one on the way to the hospital and I believe the third is in serious condition.

Who is to blame ? 

Is it the civic authority who badly planned the corner ? Is it the truck driver who was over the speed limit ? Or is  it the auto driver who loaded one extra person ? Or maybe its the parents who sent them to small city Manipal to get good degrees ? or the innocent kids who went to the little town to study and achieve the stars they had in their eyes ?

Each has his own justification to feel himself innocent in his mind.

Such a tragic unnecessary end to lives so young. We all read about such incidents in the papers or hear of them from friends f friends and say that it could never happen to our kids. WRONG !! These could be your children, they were the children of people just like you and me.

I have someone very close who is in college in Indore studying engineering and it gives me the shudders to think of what can happen any single night. When time came for me to choose which college my niece would attend I chose Singapore instead of India for simply this reason. We Indians do not value the individual life. For us the deaths are just a number on a chalkboard, a statistic. Its a demand supply thing, we simply have too many lives. Even the Govt has valued the Indian life at 2 Lakhs , which is what they give as an exgratia amount, every time there is a natural disaster.

The time has come for us to go to the other room and take a long look at our children / nephews / grandchildren. Give them a tight hug since unless we get law and order back on our roads, the next time they go out, it could be them in the auto. 

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Is se mera kya hoga ?

As I write this article,  I read in the Times of India that the union Law ministry has given the ok to raise the possible fines 10 fold to try and curb rash driving. How many of us think that is going improve anything ?

No way. Corruption in India is so rampant that all pushing up fines will do is increase the entry barrier. Its an open secret that corruption in the traffic dept. is at an all time high due to the system which is frankly, nuts.

The system is designed to make things so difficult that the motorist will want to take the easy way out. This is done by designing the whole system of impounding the licence (since people below a certain rank cannot compound [forgive by taking a fine on the spot] an offense) and then subjecting the motorist to a completely maze-like head wrenching legal system where he is humiliated at every nook and turn. Most people I know will happily pay a fine if they have erred, what no one can stand is the crass humiliation the system subjects them to.

Imagine standing in the middle of a smelly court corridor, right next to the loos stinking of the fetid smell of urine (Bandra court) while you wait your turn at the dock like a common criminal. Then you’re briefed by your lawyer that if you say anything but guilty, you will be made to a hell of a lot more, so quickly plead guilty , even if you’re not and say sorry and you’re out of there. Finally, your turn comes, and the judge sneers a you as if , how could you be so stupid as to get caught. He asks how you plead, one minute later the ordeal is over, UNLESS YOU ARE STUPID ENOUGH TO PROTEST.

Therefore a motorist does what is natural, and negotiates a price which will make both their lives easier.

Since the price arrived at is one a which the motorist will find value for his time and one that the corrupt cop knows he will get no more from, all the increase in fines will do is raise the level at which both the bribe giver and the bribe taker will mutually settle.

I am all for fines going up but what we need along with the price rise in the fines is a swift judicial system , one which instead of humiliating people,  deals with them in a firm but sure manner to ensure our roads are safer for all of us. Its not that there are no traffic offenses across the world.

Ask anyone, in countries like the UK and Australia, people are scared if they make one wrong turn, since the massive fine will be collected on the spot unless you wish to contest the traffic ticket, and God help you if you try to bribe a cop.

In US a while ago, there was a bit of a spurt in corruption, so what did the Americans do, what they always do, depend upon technology. They installed cameras on cop dashboards and ,made it illegal for cops to deal with offenders outside the range of the cameras. 

The irony is, in India, which probably made the software that runs those cameras , if they try to do that, the corruption will ensure that the cameras never work and the people will accept that that’s the way India is and go back to that “sau ki patti in a silent handshake”

Collective Conscience

Conscience is an aptitude, faculty, intuition or judgment of the intellect that distinguishes right from wrong. Moral judgement may derive from values or norms (principles and rules). In psychological terms conscience is often described as leading to feelings of remorse when a human commits actions that go against his/her moral values and to feelings of rectitude or integrity when actions conform to such norms. The extent to which conscience informs moral judgment before an action and whether such moral judgments are or should be based in reason has occasioned debate through much of the history of Western philosophy – Wikipedia

My friends, I mourn the near death of our collective conscience in Indian citizens. Once in a while like the IAC agitation, it does show some signs of recovery but on the whole I think any good doctor would pronounce it almost dead.

There are many of the symptoms of the disease all around us, one such symptom is the article in the newspaper where traders are complaining that the cargo facilities at Mumbai Airport are so dismal that goods are stored in the open air for lack of space. Since it rained a few days ago unexpectedly, valuable life saving equipment like imported CATSCAN machines were badly damaged.

On the other hand just a couple of days before that there was an article that the slums are being cleared around the airport to make way for shopping malls. AND NO ONE BLINKED AN EYELID. In a society where the collective conscience was alive and well, people would have poured out on the streets screaming that airport land should be used for Airports and passengers and cargo , not malls.

Another symptom visible, was the attitude of people when the Kiran Bedi fudging of the bills came out. It seems Kiran Bedi one of the leading lights of Team Anna, is usually invited for lectures, etc. The normal arrangement for such invitations is that the hosts pay for the airfare, etc. In Ms. Bedis case she has recd a gallantry award which entitles her to airfare @25% ( 75% discount) of the standard fare.

It has been reported that despite the fact that Ms. Bedi was invited for being a prominent person , exactly the same reason for which she recd the discount award, this discount was never passed onto hosts and they were billed for the full fare. Since this bill was a re-imbursement of expenses, technically this is a misrepresentation which could in certain ways be interpreted as a fraud on the hosts.. AND NO ONE BLINKED AN EYELID.

When this came out, people howled in her favour from the rooftops saying things like:

She never pocketed any money herself ( eg excuse used by Manmohan singh)

The benefits of this mis-billing went to the NGO ( eg excuse for all sops, rob rich to pay poor)

What was the harm, who lost money, people who were aware of the arrangements and would have paid that much anyways ? (eg excuse of policy decision on 2G)

The best and most revealing dialog on this was from Mr. Ram Jethmalani, that old fox, said “Fudging of bills is in Indian blood, everybody does it” (paraphrased). For example, The peon fudges his expenses to the boss, the boss fudges his income tax and the govt is creative with its figures to the public. Everyone does it.

The death of the collective conscience is there in the fact that a group of people are able to enter the Supreme Court and assault a senior lawyer and then crow about it to the world with impunity. The silence of the same rabble who screamed from the rooftops about the supremacy of the Parliament and how it was being subverted are now deathly silent on the insult to the sanctity of the Supreme Court.

The closeness of the death of this conscience is visible from the  fact that Indian citizens are sitting arguing for and against the death sentences of the People who attacked the same Parliament with weapons and in whose attack brave jawans died. A large amount of these people arguing are the very same who felt that an old frail man in a khadi cap was a threat to the same Parliament and were screaming at the top of their voices against him.

Another glaring example of this rot is in the open murder of a couple of youngsters at Amboli ( Andheri W in Mumbai). It seems that a few youngsters boys and girls went to a restaurant at Amboli  for dinner. After dinner they went to eat paan outside. While buying the paan , a drunk man fell on one of the girls and pawed at her. Naturally the boys did what any person would do, they pushed him away and threatened him with a thrashing.

The man seeing that he was perhaps going to be thrashed ran away but within minutes he was back with three autorickshaw loads of men with rods and chains and a sickle. These people set upon the youngsters and slit open the stomach of one and has injured another fatally. The bystanders stood around gawking and fearing for their lives silently instead of rushing to their help, AND NO ONE BLINKED AN EYELID

The rot shows in the fact that the drunk was able to gather 3 autoloads to come and kill young boys, The rot shows in the fact that when he cops went to arrest the accused, the slum dwellers attacked the cops.

I don’t know about you, but I have a young son, and everytime he goes out, I’m afraid of what incident may end up costing his life. Friends, we are all playing Russian Roulette with our kids. We are counting on the numbers to say it will happen to others and not to our kids, there are so many other kids in Mumbai to get killed, mine never will.

>>> BREAKING NEWS >>> As I write this the papers report another incident of similar mob violence against a young boy who refused the advances of a young girl at Mulund. It seems this teenage girl was besotten with this boy and hen he refused her advances she got a gang of boys to attack him with rods etc in broad daylight. Not only that , its now reported that knowing they had not finished him off , they had the guts to enter the hospital with weapons to finish the job there, but ran away when they were detected.

Lets face facts. Mumbai is dying. Forget the glitzy towers, the big cars, the flash of jewellery showrooms, the air conditioners in slums. The real life of a city is its culture and homogeneity, ours unfortunately is being sacrificed on the altar of greed.

The irony is we may blame the whole stinking mess on our politicians but the real culprit is all around us , its the death of all our collective conscience.

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The curious case of Ms. Bedi

An interesting twist in the Ms. Bedi case is now it has come out that he bills for the FULL amount were raised by a travel agent and not the NGO. So I am eagerly awaiting the news of how the extra amount was transferred from Travel Agent to NGO and if the whole amount was given or was a little something held back as arrangement fees?

To the supporters of Ms. Kiran Bedi who are blindly thrashing out, let me point out that the Govt is in the habit of making us overlook things by putting a grey cloud over it and confusing the hell out of us, if we allow others to do it shame on us.

We cannot condone one kind of corruption and condemn another.

Doing our bit

Today, someone parked his car in such a way that our whole lane was blocked while he was up partying at a neighbours house. When the watchman of our building tried to stop him explaining he would cause inconvenience to hundreds of residents, he said do your worst.  Then in another incident, at Amboli, a motorcyclist hit another at full speed and then started to argue with victim, despite the fact that he was driving recklessly and without a helmet.

India today reminds me of an old story I heard once. It seems there was a very rich king who was greedy for more, more power more money. So he consulted his priests as to how he could become richer and more powerful.

His priests told him, that he needed to perform a yajna (a ritual of offering to the Gods). Accordingly, he asked for a large pit to be dug in the centre of the capital. He then made a proclamation that each subject must make an offering into the pit of a bucket of milk as an offering to the Gods to make their kingdom prosper.

All day no citizen came forward , and the king got more and more anxious. He sent sentries to each household to tell them that they would be arrested if they did not put in their share. As it started to get dark, the citizens started lining up to pour their offerings into the pit. By midnight everyone had poured their offering and the king retired to his bed happy.

The next morning, lo and behold, everyone was amazed when they found that the whole pit was full of water. It seems like every citizen had put in a bucket of water instead of milk thinking dilution of one bucket of water in hundreds of buckets of milk would never be noticed

Some thought, why should I give up my childs’ milk to make everyone else richer, another thought I’m poor and have only one cow, let the richer folk with more cows make up my share, yet another thought let the kingdom become richer or poorer what’s it got to do with me. Each one had some excuse or the other in his mind with which he justified his misdeed.

We are all that way, in our minds we have one excuse or another for that corner we cut in our duties towards India. For example, only 3% of India is registered for Income Tax, 97% doesn’t even come on the radar.

We all know that the prosperity of a nation depends upon the contribution of its citizens. However, scam after scam is being unearthed, each one headed by a citizen of India some of them as high as Cabinet Ministers and State Chief Ministers.

Like the citizens of the kingdom in the story who put buckets of water instead of milk, each one of us has some justification or the other in his mind for skipping his duty towards the general good of the nation which allows us to sleep at night.

What is sad is its not the outsiders coming in on zodiac boats carrying AK47s who are killing India, it is its own citizens in their blind selfishness.

Bucket after bucket of water is being poured into the pit by Indian Citizens who is not ashamed of what he is doing, after all how will his bucket of water affect the pit full of milk put in by others.

Happy Birthday Pops

I am almost 100% sure that today if Mahatma Gandhi ( who we call Father of our nation, lovingly referred to as Bapu) would have said “I told you so”

After we had gained freedom, It seems Bapu said to Manuben that he had lost faith in the Congress and he wanted it disbanded. He said they were no longer able to or willing to work along his principles.

Power politics prevailed and Congress remained.

This week has shown the wisdom of his words. In the last 6 months we have a PM declaring , he has no control of the country due to co-alition politics. We have a Finance Minister declaring he cannot control runaway inflation. We have a Home Minister who says he cannot stop terrorists attacks.

What can the Govt do? May I the common citizen of India ask ?

Today we have a Congress Govt who has in place a Finance Minister who says he sees Inter Ministerial Official Memoranda (notes) but doesn’t read them and passes them on ? That means almost all the “notes” seen by him and decisions made on them, can be recalled in future since he can claim he saw them but didn’t approve them.  Is this the form of Parliamentary Democracy the Govt is so desperately trying to protect.

We have a Govt which has a Minister who claims dementia and still wants to attend Parliament, and a Home Minister who announces in a Press conference smirking, that “he has a short memory” click here to view. In some circles that’s a sign of an unsound mind. I’m surprised that the journalists laughed, I would have screamed at him:

Is there anyone sane left in the UPA ? Dear Home Minister, please do remember that youre a Home Minister in charge of Police and Homeland Security and that we have terrorist attacks regularly and that something should be done about them. If your “memory loss” is genuine, please resign immediately to save the lives of our brave officers.

This kind of callous joking in the face of terror attacks which cost Indian lives is a slap in the face of the families of the martyrs, be it RR Patil and his “chote Mote Haadse” comment on the Mumbai attack or Chidambram on his “short memory” remark on such a serious issue. It is symbolic of the problem facing Indian Govt today.

Earlier when we visited Govt offices, the fat babus sitting behind their desks were not afraid. They knew their jobs were secure so they behaved disgracefully with common people. Chidu and the rest of the Govt are doing the same. They are complacent and cocking a snook at us from their lofty chairs saying “touch us if you dare for the next 2 years”.

RR Patil was removed as Home Minister in an eyewash, he came back as soon as the public attention was misdirected and today Mumbai is as unsafe as it was, in fact more since the thieves have seen the path and they know the worst they will get is a bullet and matyrdom or a tonne of attention and biryani.

Chidu knows nothing can touch him which is why he can record a soundbyte confession which technically disqualifies him from a Ministerial or even a Parliamentarian post under Sec 191 of the Indian Constitution (click here to read). Whats the worst that can happen, if people catch on, he will go on record and say like Pranabda and say  that “he said the words, but they weren’t his”, and people will go about their happy ways thinking matter is closed.

Folks, Bapu is dead but we are not. Anna showed us the way for which I will be eternally thankful to him and for which he must go down in the annals of history. His words “ I am Anna, you are Anna, we all are Anna” in my mind reflects “ I am Bapu, you are Bapu we all are Bapu”

Let the Bapu in each of us arise on this Occasion of his Birthday and stand up and say “I AM BAPU” and I am a proud proud Indian and no Govt is going to grind me to the ground.

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To those detractors who will bombard me for misusing the Gandhi ( In my mind there is only one true Gandhi, rest are just a surname) name.

I ask you to look in the mirror. Today Tushar Gandhi (Bapu’s great Grandson) has written in Times Life that Anna showcased that as long as the ends were noble the means did not matter. This, Bapu, would not agree with.

Let me see, Hmmmmm…isnt this the same Tushar Gandhi who sold the Mahatma’s name to a pen company in return for a cheque to a foundation which according to him was a noble cause and that the end justified the means….ROFLMAO

I love these holier than thou people, they make my Sundays.